Why is it so much easier to say 'no' when what really want to say 'yes'? Would you like to dance? No (yes, I would but I'm too shy). Would you like the last piece of cake? No (yes I would, but I'm too polite). Would you like $20m? No (yes I would but, ah, I'm worried how people will see me given the 'current financial climate'). England didn't say 'yes' once last week. They were a relentless source of negativity.

In the end England got caught in such a state of confused denial about what they were doing here that they stank out Antigua like a fat, drunken uncle on the dance floor at a wedding. The problem with the 20/20 for 20 wasn't Sir Allen Stanford - it was the English and their inability to embrace the spirit of the Super Series. There was no angst for the West Indians, no doubts about how to celebrate if they won, no worries about what people would think of them for getting so rich so quick, and absolutely no confusion about their desire to win and their motivation to do so. There was certainly no creeping suspicion that much of their public was actually hoping they would lose.

It wasn't just the English players who got it wrong. There were plenty of conversations in hotel bars around the island about how the press had overreacted to the controversies of the preceding week: whipping, for example, the story about the ECB's routine end-of-series review into a frothy mess of supposedly startling intrigue. The administrators did their bit too, seemingly bickering between themselves about who was getting what cut of the money set-aside for the management. Certainly the right hand spent far too much time issuing off-the-record briefings about what the left was doing.

There was nothing surprising about all this. Money makes good men bad, as any amount of singers, playwrights and novelists will tell you. It makes an Englishman worse still. 20/20 for $20m, winner-takes-all, is an innocent enough idea in theory, it is the emotions it provokes that are odious. The money was just the plot device, the MacGuffin that made the whole thing hang together. The trouble is what it brings with it: greed, envy, and strife.

Weaned on the all-pervading Premier League, English sport could only react in one way to the injection of such a vast sum. Over the next five years cricket is going to become far more like modern football, a bloated, pig-ugly business. The players were a little naive this time around because of the novelty of the situation, but over time their attitudes will harden.

Soon, as with football, whatever empathy there is between the players and the fans will be severed altogether. Press conferences will become exercises in the art of saying nothing in the blandest possible manner. Understandably so, because by playing for this kind of money the players will make themselves 'fair game' for the basest kind of reporting. In England the extra rewards will always be accompanied by more opprobrium.

The Series was only two days old when cricket suddenly developed Wags, and one of the players wives was splashed across the press in a manner that would have been inconceivable in the old days of on-tour omerta. There was inherent distrust between the players and the media. Platitudinous assurances of "commitment" to "Team England" were fed to the fans. Closeted in the same claustrophobic hotel with their families and the English press, the players were face-face with these things every day. None of them gave the impression they enjoyed it.

In the circumstances it is easier to understand why the players were confused about the situation they found themselves in. They would have saved themselves a lot of trouble by simply admitting and concentrating on the fact that they were here to win money, but they would have been just as damned in the papers if they had done so. Cricket is not losing its soul, it is just growing an evil new one.

As long as cricket is played for the sums of money involved in Twenty20, whether it is the BCCI's or Sir Allen Stanford's the stories will become less about the cricket on the field and more about the players off it. The agenda will be one of intrigue and conflict. Stanford was not the one to blame for this mess - we were. He is just the man standing in the middle of the room with a barrow full of cash. Such vast sums bring out the worst in human nature, no wonder they did the same to this game.